Dead Flowers

by Alex Laidlaw

  By now my son is asleep, so I don’t have to bother making sense of the tale.

  * * *

  The detective asks, How d’you like my hat?

  A body washes up in the river. The paramedics jump out of their bus. One of them asks me, How it’s going?

  I tell him it’s going alright.

  * * *

  My friend asks of her lover, What did you gain, trading one place for another?

  He sits naked at the corner of her bed, his penis like a sock. I see he’s got a tattoo on his outer thigh.

  I was drinking too much. In addition to which I was young and proud and scared. Whenever I drank coffee, I was scared of death. When I smoked, I was scared of sex. I fell in and out of love, in and out of a woman’s bed, scared of love, scared of life, scared of all the vibrating parts, the unaccomplished exorcism of my psyche, embarrassed by the crookedness of this, he says and gestures to his sock. This body of rotten leaves. This body electric, until after the rain. Etcetera, etcetera. Spending and fatigue. Departed and arrived. What’s found is lost…

  We kill the lights.

  * * *

  There are words so personally dangerous they’ve got to be hidden in a litany of prose. That’s when a writer has got too much to lose.

  When I hold my child, I try to make my body soft for him, but my body isn’t soft. It’s full of bones held together by leathery skin. My son puts me into contact with my skeleton and I think of how awful it must feel. He sleeps on my chest, my chest made of bones.

  I have seen the soft belly of a woman after everything is done—how fingers worked into the skin can make a river of the floor. Who will understand? My only explanation requires a story about a bottle and a cherry pit, but I can’t remember sixty out of ninety of the words. Forget it. The town empties. Nobody makes a noise. Nothing but wait and see. Another night. And it’s early November now.

  * * *

  A man went into the river in the broad light of the afternoon. They say his penis was a purple flower, or a jelly bean, before he went under.

  The next day a new series premiered, all about the lives of ordinary people in the neighbourhood. In the first episode, an elderly woman mails fifty-five copies of her house key to people in the town. She sits in a living room rocking chair with a photo album open on her lap. The pictures of her family, her husband, her children, her life, have her feeling bittersweet. She hears footsteps in the outer hall, but nobody opens the door. It’s an episode of muted despair.

  * * *

  I wait three hours for my friend to arrive, forced in the meantime to listen to the man.

  He says, The kid dreamt of a someone who would cross his path. That someone would be made of elephant tusks and the two of them would recognize each other immediately. The whole rest of the dream, the kid was trying to get back to his girlfriend’s place. He needed to be certain that the door was locked because he knew now that the elephant being would be coming for them, carrying a knife to split ’em length-long and thin…

  Ever since my friend got him talking, that man has been unable to stop. All his stories are empty now, or populated with reflections at best. I wonder if emptiness is catching. Finally I get bored and leave. I go to the river. Doors hang open on empty factories, on broken homes.

  I ask, Should I go in?

  The answer is yes.

  * * *

  At work, it’s row by row. We go about our business and never ask—

  Now what was is flipped, and in the late afternoon I take a bath without considering the light or time of day. I close the bathroom door and shut the light within. I lie in the bath with a washcloth over my eyes. I stay like that for God-only-knows, could be the length of how many, so many instants lined up tit to tail—could have been two hours, three months like that, lost in no thinking at all.

  After draining the bath, then towelling off, I’m surprised to find the windows are dark. I am stunned, temporarily amazed.

  Later I’ll go for a walk, finding empty branches on every tree.

  What’s even more: the wind has stopped.

  * * *

  What happened?

  Every drop of dreaming that I ever dreamt I did for you. I am an empty shell—a limp dick, if you want. And all I ever learned about the nature of a body, I learned it allegorically. I stood on balconies, in bedrooms, in bathrooms, on the stairs. And it cost a lot of blood in general, but none of it was mine. It cost me almost nothing.

  Meanwhile the town has gone musty, old, quiet—they say it’s less dangerous, but I’d still look out for certain narrow ways on certain nights, for certain bars where certain bartenders pontificate upon the nature of hell. It’s become an awful bore, at any rate. I’m just about ready to pack up my family and go.

  * * *

  The detective wants to know about the flowers.

  The kid says, What’s there to know?

  He says he wants to know where’d you get the branch, and where did it go? Those sorts of things.

  The kid answers with a question: Did you ever think of anything for such a long time, it left a blank spot in the centre of your head?

  I climbed a set of stairs to get a vantage over the town. The truth is I know nothing about mystery though I have chased it in these streets. I was here for the conception of this, but I don’t know how it happened. I can’t make any sense of it.

  * * *

  My friend is in her kitchen. The man readies to go. She’s untangling a thread, using the tip of a needle. She waits to hear his footsteps in the hall.

  No one will bathe in her waters now. There’ll be no one now to make sense of her skin, nor to silk the subtle floral of her moods, nor commit to her indifference.

  What love doesn’t do, she says, rage will create. What pain doesn’t do, rage will invent.

  She waits to hear the hard-heeled knock of a shoe beyond the door. He’s ready to go.

  You’ll get wet, she says. It’s raining.

  I’ve been worse, says the man. When he goes, he leaves the door hanging open.

  St. Henri, 2010

  Acknowl­edge­ments

  Thanks to everyone at Nightwood Editions who participated in the making of this book, to its editor Amber McMillan, and especially to Silas White for the opportunity.

  Thanks to the early readers of these stories for their insight and encouragement, in particular to my parents Mary and Bob, my uncle Stephen Laidlaw and to Nathan Szymanski.

  Thanks to Andrew Szymanski, always my first and favourite reader, long-time friend and partner in this (too often) miserable effort at becoming writers.

  Thanks to Janine for her continuous, invaluable support.

  And to Janine for having sewn together, through all these years, the fabric of a life with me.

  And to Casper and Sebastian (bless their little hearts) for doing as they ought to do—throwing wrench upon wrench upon wrench into the gears.

  About the Author

  Sunshine Coast, BC author Alex Laidlaw’s writing has been featured in SubTerrain, Event, Cosmonaut Avenue and the Hart House Review among other literary magazines. He holds a BA in literature from the University of Victoria. He lives with his wife and two sons on BC’s Sunshine Coast.

  Photo Credit: Janine Young